


The City is a Woman

by venndaai



Category: Discworld - Terry Pratchett
Genre: 5 Times, Alternate Universe - Gender Changes, Aromantic Character, Bechdel Test Pass, F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-19
Updated: 2015-03-19
Packaged: 2018-03-18 14:36:27
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,397
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3573326
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/venndaai/pseuds/venndaai
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Four times Vetinari didn't fall in love, and one time she did.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The City is a Woman

**Author's Note:**

> Lady Vetinari's first name is lovingly stolen from the incredible story [Ladies Who Organize](http://archiveofourown.org/works/1123812), which you should go read immediately if you haven't already as it is far superior to mine.

Haveline Vetinari and Sybil Ramkin first met at an official school dance. Calling it a ball would have been severely overstating its grandeur. The young men of the Assassin’s school were allowed to mingle, under careful supervision, with the young women of the Quirm College for Young Ladies. This was naturally rather awkward for the few female Assassin students, who were discouraged from showing too much interest in the ladies from Quirm. They mostly gravitated to the girls they knew from other nobbish parties and commiserated over the stupidity of the Guild boys.

The very young Lady Vetinari did not know anyone, and so was surprised to find herself physically pulled into a group by a large girl with an expensive wig and a shockingly honest smile. “You looked so lonely!” Sybil explained, and then asked Vetinari questions about herself with such intense eagerness that Vetinari had no choice but to believe that she truly wanted to know.

 Vetinari watched the faces of Sybil's friends and found that only half of them thought her stupid and contemptible. The other half smiled shyly back at her and confided in her their deepest fears and desires.

“It must be jolly hard, being outnumbered by all these boys,” Sybil said, and Vetinari replied,

“I suppose so,”

 caught between amusement and bafflement.

 Somehow she ended the evening having promised to write Sybil regularly and a sensible scrunchie to tie back her hair because “honestly, Haveline, it must get in the way of your work.”

 She'd mostly forgotten all about that night when an envelope so thick it was in danger of bursting appeared in her cubbyhole. She read the letter over a breakfast of crumpets, toast and unoriginal insults from Downey.

 Her heart sank as she read it. It was a recounting of small details in Sybil's life and a mountain of gossip about her schoolmates and teachers, written in an unbearably cheerful, positive tone, a tone which was sure everyone was a jolly good fellow deep down, what? At least the spelling and grammar were impeccable.

 Halfway down the first page Vetinari stopped, unable to go on. She put the letter down and picked up another crumpet.

 Her hand paused halfway to her mouth. She was still for a moment, thinking, hearing but not listening to the ordinary breakfast noises of rattling cutlery, Downey's increasingly angry jibes, and the far-off scream of a first-year who had accidentally taken a senior's seat.

 She put the crumpet back on her plate, licked the jam off her fingers, and carefully picked up the page again.

 After a while, she replaced it with the second page.

 By the fourth things were clear. The friends Sybil had written about belonged to the most influential families on the Disc. Some, like Princess Dacite and the second child of the Copperhead mine leader, were the highest of royalty. Some had subtler connections to power, like Tanith Beechdown, whose mother was, according to Sybil's archly phrased gossip, a thirty percent legitimate business trader.

 And Sybil's letter was chock full of small, not particularly harmless tidbits of information about each of these venerable families.

 Vetinari took out her pen and began to take notes.

 “What've you got there, Dog-Botherer, a letter from your girlfriend?” shouted Downey, who had assumed quite a lot from Vetinari's lack of interest in his dubious charms. Vetinari stood up without taking her eyes off the page. A very sharp steel fork spun idly between her fingers for a few seconds and then, still reading, she performed a quick sideways flick of the wrist. Downey could not stop himself from flinching. The corners of Vetinari's mouth turned up, though she could not possibly have seen him flinch. She walked quickly to the dorms, already composing a reply in her head.

 Vetinari had intended to establish a steady routine with the letters, but that was impossible. The gaps between letters closed rapidly, both of them scribbling out replies on the same day they received a letter. Vetinari wrote letters when she was supposed to be taking notes on her Poisoning lectures. She wrote in tasteful Nap Hill cafes and in seedy Scours taverns, where she worried the bartenders by ordering a large glass of clean water (ten pence in Ankh-Morpork) and sitting in the corner for hours, just watching the other patrons come and go.

 Sybil wrote in sunny fields or at the tops of good climbing trees or in the pens of the Quirm Dragon Sanctuary. Her letters always smelled faintly of hay and were only sometimes slightly singed.

 Vetinari wrote, _when you're next in the city, you must let me take you out for curry._

 Sybil Ramkin had been bred for sensibleness, but even the most sensible nature cannot stand against the force of certain ideas that girls pick up at fifteen. Sybil was large and kind and did not have a clever face. She was not used to being really listened to, or taken out for curry. And from a certain angle, if you squinted, Haveline Vetinari sort of matched a profile found in many of the books that got passed around the Quirm School, the ones with shirtless men on the cover. Vetinari was not tall, or particularly handsome, but she had dark hair and pale skin, she was interestingly orphaned and she was intriguingly dangerous.

 When her father took ill she was guiltily grateful for the chance to come into town. The family doctor assured her that the disease was only barely fatal and if the Ramkin money kept coming her father would be sure to recover in no time at all. Sybil nodded and signed a bank note and then she sat in the garden and reread The Book. The one she'd found in Headmistress Delany's Confiscated cupboard, the one with the cover torn off and the pages bent. The story of Laura, golden-haired white-nightgowned flower of virgin nobility, seduced into a dangerous friendship by a black-clad foreign girl with flashing eyes. Laura's bosom sure did seem to heave a lot. Sybil wondered if that was a requirement. She looked down at her own chest, took a deep breath, and concluded that she probably wouldn't have any trouble in that department.

 Somehow this all added up to Sybil shyly taking Vetinari's hand and stumbling over an awkward confession that she really, really liked Vetinari and it would be very nice to do this sort of thing on a permanent basis.

 Vetinari froze, a look of horror on her sharp face.

 Later, Sybil would generally skip over the minutes that followed, and indeed the hours, though she did remember stomping into her room, face burning red with shame, frightening poor Gamsey the Fourth into belching a cloud of smoke and skittering under the bed. She remembered the acid smell, the tears and snot dripping down her face and onto the stupid white dress she'd had such hopes for, and she remembered throwing herself face down on the bed and swearing to die an old maid.

 The row that took place over the next few months was horrible, and the worst part was that it wasn't really a row at all, just a frigid silence. A distinct absence of communication. Sybil returned to the country, and Vetinari returned to the cold and echoey Guild halls, abandoning her curry shops and urban explorations. Sybil took to spending her days viciously mucking out the dragon pens, cursing herself for the stupidity that had cost her the friend she most cared about.

 Then one day in winter Sybil found a letter in her box. It was quite short, and uncharacteristically awkward, but Sybil read the intent behind every word and grinned. On the back was a carefully penciled math puzzle, boxes filled with numbers. _I bet the Quirm School for Young Ladies has better algebra teachers than the Assassin's Guild,_ a precise hand had written. _Then again, practically anywhere would. Downey spent three days on this and couldn't solve it. I'd appreciate it if you showed him up._

 “Oh, you are insufferable,” Sybil muttered, but she was still smiling, and reaching for her pencil box.

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

Ankh-Morpork was a very large city, and thus had to carefully ration its natural supply of narrativium. It therefore gratified something in the romantic corner of Vetinari's soul that the funeral was attended by pouring rain.

 Apart from the constant, dour rain, the gathering included the remains of the Night Watch, a scattering of military men, the seamstresses of Treacle Mine Road, and a few other odds and ends. Vetinari recognized CMOT Dibbler- he was not someone you forgot, once you had tasted his pies- but the others were not known to her. Little people, in her aunt's worldview. On this day, Vetinari found it impossible to look down on them. The dead belonged to them, not to her.

 (Later, Sam Vimes would recall a cold, wet funeral attended only by coppers. Such is the lens of memory.)

 Vetinari was practicing daylight camouflage, which required a slightly different skillset than its nocturnal cousin. She was concentrating on this, and also watching the other funeral attendees, and the part of her mind that was always observing the other parts told her she was doing this to deprive herself of any time to ponder her own thoughts and feelings. She told that part it could go fuck itself.

 Lance-Constable Vimes was crying, the ugly snotty kind of crying, but something had changed underneath. He was angry. It was written in every tense line of his body, in his clenched fists, in the way he glared as the cheap plywood coffins disappeared beneath shovelfuls of dirt.

 Vetinari hoped he'd find a way to use that anger productively.

 Rosie Palm spotted her. She's expected that. She was still fairly bad at hiding without shadows, and Miss Palm was nearly as excellent a starer as the late John Keel. Lance-Constable Vimes should take lessons from her, Vetinari thought.

 "I suppose I shouldn't be surprised to see you here," said Miss Palm, severe in a stiffly conservative funeral black. She did have an ostentatiously lacy monstrosity of a black umbrella, and her eyes cast judgement on Vetinari's soaked gray coat and sodden gray trousers. "Nice job at the palace."

 Vetinari acknowledged this with a curt nod. To be honest, she was starting to feel a bit embarrassed about the whole thing. She'd spent months choreographing it in her head, agonized over her lines, and now she realized it had all been far too showy and juvenile. Theatrical, even.

 John Keel, she felt, would not have approved.

 Over Miss Palm's shoulder, she caught sight of a discretely parked black carriage. "Excuse me," she said.

 Lady Meserole did not comment on her niece dripping acidic Ankh-Morpork rainwater on the expensive leather seats of the carriage. Silence reigned for approximately five minutes, as the carriage trundled down the hill from Small Gods towards Broadway.

 At the turn, Lady Meserole broke the quiet. She couldn't help herself.

 “Perhaps it is for the best, my dear,” she ventured.

 The pause that followed this was somehow far more oppressive than the previous silence. Lady Meserole had no choice but to forge on.

 “He couldn't possibly have lived up to your expectations of him. He would have disappointed you. Men always do.”

 The traffic changed. Lady Meserole's driver urged the horses around the corner. Their hooves splashed across the cobblestone road that was rapidly becoming a medium-sized stream.

 “Aunt,” Vetinari said, calmly and coldly, “I have no idea what you are talking about.”

 

 

* * *

 

 

It was not raining, that morning three months later when Lady Margolotta von Uberwald looked out from her own rather more extravagantly black carriage and saw a badly sunburned young woman sitting quietly on the rim of the fountain in the middle of the sunny town square.

 She murmured a command to the horses, and then she descended from the carriage, a stylish wine red parasol tilted carefully above her for maximum shade.

 Lady Margolotta greatly approved of the Grand Sneer. It brought a much-needed influx of young blood to sleepy little Bonk, and she always preferred snacking on insufferable people. It seemed more just.

 “My dear,” she said in heavily accented Morporkian, voice dripping honey, “do you not have a zun hat? Zey are essential, you know, for avoiding heatstroke. And ah me, has no one told you you must vear vhite on such hot days? Black zoaks up ze sun appallingly.”

 The girl gazed at her with clear blue eyes. “Lady Margolotta Amaya Katerina Assumpta Crassina Lucretia Mariana Tatiana Anzhelika Vladlena Dominica Elizaveta Klavdiya Antoinette von Uberwald!” she said in only slightly accented Uberwaldean- not the usual faux Escrow dialect, Margolotta noticed, but a more natural Ramtops pronunciation, with just a taste of Morporkian crispness. “Apologies for the short form, but unfortunately I do not have an eternal life and must make the most of the time I have in delightful Bonk. I assume you are indeed Lady Margolotta, unless there is another great lady in the area?”

 Margolotta smiled. “There are other von Uberwalds in the castle down the road,” she said, replying in her native tongue, “but I am afraid there is no one there whom I would classify as a _lady_.”

 The corners of the girl's mouth twisted. “Ah. Well, it's a pleasure to make your acquaintance, my lady.”

 There were no suspicious lumps under her severe black dress that might indicate concealed items of a stakelike persuasion, and she did not smell at all of garlic. Margolotta thought for a moment, and came to a decision. “All right, come inside then,” she said, gesturing to the carriage door. “You are getting disgustingly sunburned. Let me take you to my humble abode and give you a salve and a refreshing beverage.”

 The girl gave her a cool look. “In a moment,” she said. “I'm not finished yet.”

 Margolotta raised an eyebrow. The foreigner was sitting extraordinarily still, and just... looking. At nothing in particular, so far as Margolotta could tell. The sleepy village square, the old dog twitching in its sleep, the houses that so charmingly resembled the creations of a mad cakemaker... there was nothing of any interest.

 “My dear, whatever are you doing?”

 She smiled. “Observing.”

 She was certainly _compelling_.

 

 This, Margolotta thought some hours later, reclining back against the headboard, was possibly the most interesting thing to happen to her in the past millennium.

 Haveline, surprisingly, was blushing, her already reddened face turning even more scarlet, in sharp contrast with the rest of her, which was so pale she could almost be a daughter of the night, were it not for that face. “Well,” she said, thoughtfully, “that was- educational.”

 “ _Educational,”_ Margolotta repeated.

 “Very educational,” Haveline amended.

 “Would you like to do it again?”

 Haveline considered. “I'd rather a rematch at Thud.”

 And Margolotta was surprised yet again, to find that she would quite prefer that, too.

 

 

* * *

 

 

“What,” her lordship said, flatly.

 The commander shifted, looking even more uncomfortable, insofar as that was humanly possible. “The assassins arranged things to imply that, er, you had assaulted Mister Drumknott out of, ah, um,” His face screwed up in agony. “Carnal jealousy, milord.”

 The Patrician stared at him.

 Shamefully, Drumknott was glad of the commander's predicament; as long as her lordship was looking at His Grace, it meant she wasn't looking at him. The duke of Ankh appeared to be fervently praying that the ground would open and swallow him up. Drumknott heartily sympathized.

 The silence stretched, along with the agony. After a very long pause, the Patrician said, “Thank you, Commander. You may go now.” There was enough ice in her voice to transform an ocean into a glacier.

 Relief crashed over Samuel Vimes's face, and he actually bowed before running for the door. Drumknott closed his eyes, listening to the click of Vimes's boots dissipate into formless echoes.

 “Drumknott.”

 He really didn't want to open his eyes, but that voice couldn't be disobeyed. For the first time all day, he met the Patrician's eyes. Her face was utterly blank. Not with any of the five distinct variations of blankness that Drumknott had worked so hard to memorize, each with its own particular meaning. No, her face just had... nothing in it.

 “Milord,” he murmured, helplessly.

 “Never speak of this to me again.”

 “Milord,” he said, slightly louder, feeling as relieved as Vimes. He thought this was what condemned men given a last-second reprieve must experience. It was quite dizzying. “I'll fetch the evening reports, shall I?”

 “Do so. And- Drumknott?”

 He froze halfway across the room. “Milord?”

 “Thank you. For your loyalty. I appreciate it.”

 There was nothing Drumknott could think of to say in reply to that, so he left, hoping the Patrician had not expected a response. He was beginning to wonder if there wasn't merit in alcohol, after all. Perhaps he could find out what brand His Grace used to drink.

 

 

* * *

 

 

“And this, my dear,” her aunt said, “is the City.”

 Haveline could hear the capital letter very clearly. It was an important skill, hearing capitals, when you lived with aristocrats, when you were a girl, when you were a newly minted orphan with a worryingly uncertain future.

 She stared out of the coach window, through the crack between the heavy velvet curtains.

 Something strange was happening.

 “Children should see, and not be heard,” Haveline's father had told her, six months before he died. It was, she later thought, the only useful piece of advice he'd ever given her, the only thing truly of himself that he'd passed down to his daughter, separate from the family wealth and estates and closets full of skeletons. It was unlikely he'd really understood the gift he was giving her by directing her towards silent contemplation. All children have their own peculiar secret hobbies. Haveline's was observation, and she applied herself diligently to her art. On the country estate, this had meant watching attentively as a fox slaughtered the chickens, or as the cook tried his best to murder the scullery boy with a metal ladle. But now a whole new world was opening up for her. Never before had there been so very much to observe. She had not realized so much activity could even exist in such concentration.

 She saw a man follow an older woman into an alley, where she belted him on the head with her handbag and made off with his wallet. She saw a small dog urinating on a lamppost, and a tall man urinating on a small dog. She saw a scarecrow figure purveying suspicious comestibles on sticks. She watched a parade of monks banging gongs wind its way around a city block. She noted the uneven cobbles, the horseshit on the street, the foul smell blowing off the Ankh, the sound of a hundred thousand feet. Feet hurrying to work, feet fleeing a pursuer, feet just hanging out in the square, tapping the cobblestones idly, shooting the breeze with a fellow pair of feet.

Haveline watched, and listened, and breathed deep (though not too deep). It was like one of those mildly clever woodcuts, where at first it just looked like a hundred different little pictures, possibly of charming pastoral cabbage fields, and then you took a step back and it resolved into Blind Io's rather intimidating face, or the much more intimidating visages of Captain Cabbage and Billy the Broccoli (©BrassicaWorld, Sto Plains Growers' Association).

 The last scion of the Vetinari household was trapped in Lady Meserole's luxurious carriage. She could not physically take a step back.

 So she stepped back in her mind.

 Each tiny piece, moving on its own orbit, slotted into place between its neighbors, and Haveline observed the gods' construction of life again on a macro scale. The moving bones, the inflating lungs and heaving flanks and industrious bowels. The city was alive, and to her shock and delight, it was beautiful. Not delicately beautiful in an ivory china way, like the illustrated fairies in the books she kept getting for Hogswatch; this was a raw, stinking, visceral beauty, the tarnished glamor of something vicious and hungry and joyfully living.

 At once she knew what all the books and poets had meant when they spoke of that elusive, improbable thing: love at first sight.

 Really, she never stood a chance.

 


End file.
